Happy Hangul Day! October 9th is a South Korean national holiday held in honor of the invention of the Korean writing system, which experts have called the most "scientific" (also "ingenious," "rational," "subtle," "simple," "efficient," "remarkable") writing system ever devised.

It's a bit outside of OSNews' regular stuff (althoughnotunheard of), but as a language specialist myself, Korean, and Hangul in particular, has fascinated me for quite a while now. In contrast to other writing systems, which have developed over centuries - or millennia - without clear guidance, Hangul was more or less designed and set in stone 600 years ago, specifically for the Korean language. It is an absolutely beautiful alphabet, with a clear structure, and a unique way of organising letters - they are grouped in square morpho-syllabic blocks. To the untrained eye, Hangul may resemble e.g. Chinese characters - however, each 'character' actually consists of several letters.

Even though I'm not a programmer myself, Im pretty sure those of you who are will find Hangul fascinating. Due to its structured nature, it's incredibly easy to learn - I taught myself to read and write Hangul in a matter of days - and once you do take a few hours to grasp the basics, you'll surely come to appreciate its innate beauty and structure.

"Learn some Japanese. Then you will understand. To speak even basic Japanese, you need to learn to completely rewrite the order in which you construct a sentence.

Don't be daft. You really have no grasp of even basic linguistic processes, do you? I can guarentee you that the Japanese use exactly the same brain processing as you do when it comes to language processing (or anything else, actually). "

I glad you can "guarentee(SIC)" it for me. However, that wasn't my point. I know for a fact that I, as a learner, did not find it easy, nor comfortable, to construct simple sentences. Look at Japanese grammar, especially how one constructs lists. To list something, you must have already preprocessed the list and know if you are talking about a finite or open-ended list of items. I assure you, not all lists in Japanese are open-ended. Japanese is incredibly contextual, and spoken Japanese is terse to the point of insanity. It's rare to even use pronouns in a lot of situations. Someone with better knowledge could explain it better than me, but it is a radical departure from a Western European language. Couple that with the fact that Japanese is often hard to even translate accurately in to English, I'm pretty sure my point probably stands.

Yes I do know somewhat about linguistics. No I am not an "expert", nor is it my primary field.

The original premise was "MRI scans show that people actually think differently when they use different languages". That is untrue. The fact that you find it difficult to learn Japanese is unrelated. The fact that Japanese has a rather strong head-final word order or is pro-drop or whatever feature English doesn't have and makes it difficult to learn does not mean that an MRI scan can show the difference, nor does it mean that one "thinks differently" (a rather Whorfian statement).

The original premise was "MRI scans show that people actually think differently when they use different languages". That is untrue. The fact that you find it difficult to learn Japanese is unrelated. The fact that Japanese has a rather strong head-final word order or is pro-drop or whatever feature English doesn't have and makes it difficult to learn does not mean that an MRI scan can show the difference, nor does it mean that one "thinks differently" (a rather Whorfian statement).